Church not above law: Robertson

Australia should use its taxpayer-funded ambassador to the Holy See to increase pressure on the Vatican to accept responsibility for child abuse by the clergy, says expatriate international lawyer
Geoffrey Robertson
, QC.

Former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer was posted to the Holy See last year at a cost of $11.6 million over four years.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in its most recent annual report that the posting had enhanced Australia’s capacity “to engage the leadership of the Catholic Church on such matters of mutual international interest as inter-faith dialogue, development, human rights and food security".

But Mr Robertson said that, given the investment by taxpayers of all faiths, far more should be being done on the human rights front. “I can’t imagine
Tim Fischer
criticising Vatican diplomats for decrying homosexuality as evil," Mr Robertson said in an interview yesterday. “Is he lobbying to change Canon Law? He should be. He should also be lobbying the Vatican on its stand over condoms, because people are dying in preventable deaths in Latin America and Africa. Is he doing this? I rather doubt it."

Mr Fischer said from Rome last night that Australia’s Holy See embassy was small, but his work “embraces representations in line with government policy on HIV/AIDS and on religious freedom and human rights.

“Last week I was involved in meetings with regard to Africa and the issues which relate.

“Matters internal to the detailed workings of the Catholic Church, the oldest organisation in the world, are largely beyond my remit. But I would add that this Pope said in Easter 2005, just before his elevation, that there was ‘filth’ in the Church, and he went on to say this must be dealt with. To that I would say – given interfaith dialogue is part of my remit – amen, shalom, salaam."

Mr Robertson is in Sydney to promote his new book, The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse, in which he castigates Pope Benedict for covering up thousands of incidents of sexual abuse by priests while he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that disciplines Catholic clergy.

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Mr Robertson argues that the Catholic Church’s Canon Law provides a wholly inadequate system of justice, given its secrecy and procedures which favour defendants. He says governments should not allow it to trump domestic criminal law.

He says the “paramountcy principle" in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the Vatican has ratified but “breached most blatantly", should be part of Canon Law.

He also questions the failure of the international community to call the Vatican to account over the abuse scandals. “That the Vatican has escaped serious international censure, let alone prosecution, for its behaviour is something of a wonder," Mr Robertson writes.

The auxiliary bishop of Sydney, Julian Porteous, wrote recently in response to Mr Robertson that the church did not protect paedophile priests and in Australia it “encouraged victims of clerical abuse to take the issue to civil authorities to have it investigated by the police and then brought before a civil court".

Mr Robertson said the Pope should announce that any evidence of child abuse anywhere must be provided to police in the relevant jurisdiction, and a policy of zero tolerance should be adopted, so “one strike against a child and you are out of the church".

He also doubted whether the Church would have decided to canonise Mary MacKillop in Rome on October 17 if it was widely known that she had been excommunicated after helping to expose a paedophile priest, as reported over the weekend.